It's hard for me to write about J.D. Salinger without coming off a certain way, so I'd like to open this review by mentioning my friend Libby. Libby and I met our freshman year at NYU. One day, she started talking to me about Salinger, I forget why. Like a lot of people, my primary exposure to Salinger was Catcher in the Rye. I don't think I had read any of his three other books. But Libby laid down the line and went through a brief synopsis of each, in particular mentioning how she had written a paper about religion in "Teddy," which was the last in Nine Stories, and extremely beautiful. She explained that the majority of his work, outside of Catcher, concerned the Glass Family: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walter, Waker, Zooey, Franny, Bessie and Les. Seven children of vaudeville performers, several of them gaining notoriety on a children's quiz show radio program, and others entering careers in show business, the military, the clergy, prose and poetry (sort of). At least one out of Nine Stories is specifically about Seymour--"A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which is a masterpiece. Franny and Zooey rightly earns its place on the Best Books List (and Catcher in the Rye, I predict, will make it when it is reviewed--I read Catcher like 6 times over the course of 6 years, but I haven't read it in the last 9). I had been meaning to read these for the first time in any case, but after Libby's mini-lecture, I made it a priority and read them my freshman year. I remember having a particular soft spot for Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction and thinking they were as good as any of his other published writings. I loved him so much at this point, that I tracked down the old issue of The New Yorker that had published his story "Hapworth 16, 1924," and photocopied it and put it in a nice binder and gave it to my mother for her birthday, as she was a massive Salinger fan. I thought this was one of the better gifts I had ever gotten her, but then I actually read it. Do not read it. Read it only if you want a reading list.
So I looked forward to revisiting these two novellas, similar in length to Franny and Zooey. And I found that I felt exactly the same way about Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. It is a masterpiece on the level of his other three books (to be clear, I do not think I would consider Nine Stories to be in Best Books league, though parts of it certainly are--at least "Bananafish" would make a Best Short Stories list, which isn't a bad idea for a project). It is hilarious, socially observant, brilliantly detailed, breezily delivered, intriguing, and inviting. Seymour: an Introduction, however, had aged badly in my mind. This may come into play in the upcoming series planned for Flying Houses, the Kurt Vonnegut Project, for which I am reading Slaughterhouse Five presently, and for which I have this to say: these books may be influential to young would-be writers because they see the authors having fun with the medium. You get a sense of the possibilities of literature. At the time, when I was 19, going through the most artistically fecund period in my life, I thought the conceit of a story like Seymour was tremendously encouraging and successfully experimental. I don't feel the same about it now. Basically, I would put Carpenters in Best Books territory, and Seymour in Egregiously Frustrating territory. I guess I can't actually do that because they're together here. Anybody that reads Carpenters will go onto Seymour and maybe some people will slog their way through it out of a sense of loyalty to the author and the characters, but they might be better off putting it away after about 30 pages. I will get more deeply into the details of the plots of each in a moment, but I wanted to put this down for now, to give an overview of my general feelings on Salinger's oeuvre and distinguish my opinions on this, his final published volume.
***
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is 89 pages long. It is about Seymour's wedding day. Buddy is the main character. The time is May 1942. Buddy is in Georgia and wrangles a three-day-leave from a stay in the military hospital to take a train to New York to attend the wedding. He has no time to go to his apartment so he leaves his luggage in a locker at Penn Station. He gets in a cab and goes to an old house where the wedding is to occur. After an hour and twenty minutes, the bride, Muriel, leaves. The guests are told to "use the cars" and Buddy ends up getting into one with Muriel's aunt (Helen Silsburn), the Matron of Honor, the Matron's husband (Lieutenant), and a little old elderly mute man (Muriel's great uncle). The Matron of Honor is furious with Seymour. Nobody knows that Buddy is Seymour's brother. The tension in the early part of the scene is fantastic.
[I have to break in here and make a note. I'm finding this review hard to complete because of the great deal of time that has passed. I read Carpenters in early June. Then I read This Fight is Our Fight, Days of Abandonment, Meet Me in the Bathroom, and Giant of the Senate. Then I read Seymour: an Introduction. So while Seymour is relatively fresh in my mind, Carpenters is not. I can only attribute the gap to library deadlines and procrastination.]
Really, the cab ride reads like a play.
***
Again, another long break has occurred. You know what I'm going to say. Carpenters is great, Seymour is not, so I will attempt to illustrate that with 2 (only 2) excerpts, one from each. It is a tall task to pick out a representative sample but I think for Carpenters the choice is clear.
"The Matron of Honor seemed to reflect for a moment. 'Well, nothing very much, really,' she said. 'I mean nothing small or really derogatory or anything like that. All she said, really, was that this Seymour, in her opinion, was a latent homosexual and that he was basically afraid of marriage. I mean she didn't say it nasty or anything. She just said it--you know--intelligently. I mean she was psychoanalyzed for years and years.' The Matron of Honor looked at Mrs. Silsburn. 'That's no secret or anything. I mean Mrs. Fedder'll tell you that herself, so I'm not giving away any secret or anything.'"
.........
"'About the only other thing she said was that this Seymour was a really schizoid personality and that, if you really looked at things the right way, it was really better for Muriel that things turned out the way they did. Which makes sense to me, but I'm not so sure it does to Muriel. He's got her so buffaloed that she doesn't know whether she's coming or going. That's what makes me so--'"
She was interrupted at that point. By me. As I remember, my voice was unsteady, as it invariably is when I'm vastly upset.
'What brought Mrs. Fedder to the conclusion that Seymour is a latent homosexual and a schizoid personality?'
All eyes--all searchlights, it seemed--the Matron of Honor's, Mrs. Silsburn's, even the Lieutenant's, were abruptly trained on me. 'What?' the Matron of Honor said to me, sharply, faintly hostilely. And again I had a passing, abrasive notion that she knew I was Seymour's brother." (36...38)
This is the climax of the first "act" of the story, and probably the whole story. I believe it is representative of the qualities that make for an excellent piece of writing. I have not seen many other writers italicize portions of words to denote accents on certain words.
I also believed Salinger was something of a pioneer in his use of a footnote or two in Seymour, but recall that Nabokov published Pale Fire in 1962. Seymour is an intriguing premise. It is an artistic biography of Seymour by Buddy. The opening sentence (after two excerpts by Kafka and Kierkegaard) gives a fair indication of how bumpy things are about to get:
"At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, but at the age of forty I look on my old fair-weather friend the general reader as my last deeply contemporary confidant, and I was rather strenuously requested, long before I was out of my teens, by at once the most exciting and the least fundamentally bumptious public craftsman I've ever personally known, to try to keep a steady and sober regard for the amenities of such a relationship, be it ever so peculiar or terrible; in my case, he saw it coming on from the first." (96)
This is a difficult piece of writing. It can be very charming at times. The trope of Buddy writing in a stream-of-conscious style--commenting upon his drinking or the late hour or a recent illness--is one of its more amusing qualities. One will not deepen their understanding of Seymour by reading it. It is more about Seymour's effect on Buddy than Seymour himself. He is every bit as inscrutable a character as he appears in any other place.
Seymour is mostly notable as Salinger's comment on celebrity. If one reads the story in this context, it becomes much more interesting. Buddy is pretty much a stand-in for Salinger. He lives alone in the woods isolated from society. He wrote a bunch of the stories that Salinger published. There are a few moments that definitely break down the fourth wall.
Salinger has such a small oeuvre, and it is of such a high quality that anyone who wants to read beyond the first exposure (Catcher) will likely go through them all. This is the weakest piece, but it's still Salinger, and it's not a bad story. It's just difficult. It's very frustrating.
Because then I see the parts I underlined some fifteen years ago and am reminded that to a particular sort of young person, the story is a treasure:
"I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions [when you die]. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined." (160-161)
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